A month later, unsuccessful in getting his wife to take off her nightgown, he had the picture taken of Petra Cotes dressed as a queen. Later on, when he succeeded in getting Fernanda to come back home, she gave in to his urges in the fever of reconciliation, but she could not give him the repose he had dreamed about when he went to fetch her in the city with the thirty-two belfries. Aureli-ano Segun-do found only a deep feeling of desolation in her. One night, a short time before their first child was born, Fernanda realized that her husband had returned in secret to the bed of Petra Cotes.
"That's what happened," he admitted. And he explained in a tone of prostrated resignation: "I had to do it so that the animals would keep on breeding."
He needed a little time to convince her about such a strange expedient, but when he finally did so by means of proofs that seemed irrefutable, the only promise that Fernanda demanded from him was that he should not be surprised by death in his concubine's bed. In that way the three of them continued living without bothering each other. Aureli-ano Segun-do, punctual and loving with both of them. Petra Cotes, strutting because of the reconciliation, and Fernanda, pretending that she did not know the truth.
The pact did not succeed, however, in incorporating Fernanda into the family. úrsula insisted in vain that she take off the woolen ruff which she would have on when she got up from making love and which made the neighbors whisper. She could not convince her to use the bathroom or the night lavatory and sell the gold chamberpot to Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía so that he could convert it into little fishes. Amaranta felt so uncomfortable with her defective diction and her habit of using euphemisms to designate everything that she would always speak gibberish in front of her.
"Thifisif." she would say, "ifisif onefos ofosif thofosif whosufu cantantant statantand thefesef smufumellu ofosif therisir owfisown shifisifit."
One day, irritated by the mockery, Fernanda wanted to know what Amaranta was saying, and she did not use euphemisms in answering her.
"I was saying," she told her, "that you're one of those people who mix up their ass and their ashes."